Read the biology, point the drill.
Active offshore methane systems leave a microbial fingerprint on the seafloor. We're building a biology-first pre-screen that reads it — before anyone commits a survey vessel or an exploratory well. Target basins reach 4,000 meters; today's in-situ sensing has only been proven to about 1,800.
Exploration today is geology-first — and it ignores biology entirely.
Operators screen the seabed with seismic surveys and confirm with exploratory wells. Both are slow, expensive, and indifferent to a signal that's been sitting in the sediment the whole time.
Costly and high-risk
Offshore exploratory wells run $25–100M+ each, with high dry-hole risk on frontier acreage — and survey vessels alone cost roughly $200K a day.
A direct biological signal
Where methane seeps, specific microbes thrive at the sulfate–methane transition zone. Their presence is physical evidence of an active system below.
No one screens biology first
It's treated as an afterthought today. Using it as the primary screen, then confirming with geophysics, is the unexplored idea.
Three layers, ordered by depth.
None of it is built yet — this is the plan a pre-seed round exists to test.
In-situ bio-sensing payload
A miniaturised molecular assay — qPCR for the mcrA marker gene, sequencing for context — that runs entirely at depth and returns a result without a shore lab.
Autonomous platform
A vehicle that carries the payload to the seabed and obtains a sediment-accessible sample — the hardest open engineering question, and the one this round exists to answer.
Prediction & data layer
Models that fuse the biological signal with geophysics and bathymetry to map methane probability, and improve with every survey.
Component technologies exist; the integrated system is early — roughly TRL 3–4. This round moves the core method from concept to evidence. We don't claim it's near-ready.
Start with exploration survey & data.
The honest near-term market is the survey and exploration-data services operators already pay for to de-risk where they look. We size only the slice we can actually serve.
TAM — $8–9B
Offshore geophysical survey & exploration-data services (2024), heading toward ~$13B by 2033.
SAM — ~$1–2B
The exploration de-risking & direct-screening slice our bio-survey and data products attach to.
Early SOM — low tens of $M
A few paid surveys plus first data subscriptions in roughly 3–5 years — contingent on validation.
Everyone reads the rock. No one reads the life.
Incumbents map structures that might hold gas, or detect seepage indirectly. None screen the biology that marks an active system — that's our opening, and we complement the tools operators already buy.
| Capability | Our platform | Seismic survey | Traditional AUV | Exploratory drilling |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Biological signal detection | Core focus | None | Not addressed | None |
| In-situ genetic sequencing | Target: in-situ | None | Early prototypes | Lab only (post-core) |
| Zero drilling required | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
| Relative cost per survey area | Low–Med (target) | High | Medium | Very high |